The Clancy Brothers originally came to the United States to become actors. They settled in Greenwich Village just as the folk music scene there was ready to explode, and gained fame and fortune singing Irish folk songs with friend Tommy Makem.
Bob Dylan has always said that Liam Clancy was the finest ballad singer he ever heard.
Bob Dylan turned down an offer to headline the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969 (Jimi Hendrix ultimately headlined), even though he had been living on a farm in Woodstock for many years at that point.
On April 4, 1967, an unidentified bird made his debut in the Peanuts comic strip. After he made numerous appearances, his name was revealed to be Woodstock on June 22, 1970.
Baseball’s San Francisco Giants lost the 1962 World Series in seven games to the New York Yankees when, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and the Yankees leading 1-0, Giants 1st baseman Willie McCovey hit a screaming line drive to Yankee 2nd baseman Bobby Richardson for the final out with Giants base runners Willie Mays on second and Matty Alou on third. The 1-0 loss, Roger Angell wrote, was a “gruesome denouement [that] could have been foretold by every lifetime Giant fan.”
The ending was so painful that Giants fan Charles Schulz referred to it twice in his Peanuts comic strip. In one, Charlie Brown and Linus sit silently for the first three panels before Charlie Brown screams, “WHY COULDN’T MCCOVEY HAVE HIT THE BALL JUST THREE FEET HIGHER!!!” A couple of months later Schulz returned to the out. Again, Charlie Brown and Linus sit silently for the first three panels until Charlie Brown screams, “OR WHY COULDN’T McCOVEY HAVE HIT THE BALL EVEN TWO FEET HIGHER?”
The San Francisco Giants didn’t return to the World Series for 27 years.
The advisors whom President John F. Kennedy gathered in the White House during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis were only later referred to as EXCOMM, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.
Cuba was the third country to have a railroad (after the UK and the US), in 1837.
Vinnie Chulk is a major league pitcher and of Cuban heritage. From 2006-2008 Chulk pitched for the San Francisco Giants - yes, those SF Giants, the team that just forced tomorrow’s game 7 of the NLCS.
LET’S GO GIANTS!!!
In his later career, Adm. James T. Kirk had a San Francisco apartment. In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, you can hear the cable car bells jingling outside on the street below when he meets with Dr. McCoy.
San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments. Their maximum speed is 9½ mph (not counting free-fall).
One of the subplots of South Pacific concerns Lt. Cable falls in love with a native girl, which causes him to confront prejudice. He sings “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” as a satirical comment on racism.
Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) initiated what is considered the “golden age” of musical theatre. With Rodgers composing the music and Hammerstein writing the lyrics, five of their shows, Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959) were outstanding successes.
(…and I just have to sing, Oh what a beautiful morning!)
*Oh what a beautiful day!
I’ve got a wonderful feelin
Everything’s going my way!
*
(as an SF Giants fan, I hope it does go my way - GO GIANTS!!!)
The only two people to win a Best Tony Musical for their first two Broadway shows were Richard Adler (The Pajama Game & Dame Yankees) & Robert Lopez (Avenue Q & Book of Mormon)
The first Mormon to run for president was the first Mormon ever, church founder Joseph Smith Jr. He died in 1844 at the hands of an angry mob while running as a third-party candidate for president.
Off-Game:
Not so. Canada’s first railway, the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad, began regular service on July 25, 1836.
On-Game: the English word “mob” is likely a shortened version of the Latin phrase, “mobile vulgus”, i.e. the “fickle common people”.
D’oh! You just can’t trust those damned Commies! (The Cubans I mean, not the Canadians.)
In play: In Beauty and the Beast (1991), the first stained glass window seen in the prologue has the Latin phrase Vincit qui se vincit, which means, in a subtle prefiguring of the arc of the whole story, “He conquers, who conquers himself.”
The Romanesque-style Cathedral of Augsburg houses the oldest extant stained glass windows, five small frames depicting Old Testament figures, made circa 1050.
The nonprofit foundation which built the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. was originally headed by Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, hero of World War I.
It’s a common misconception that a non-profit organization can’t make a profit each year. “Nonprofit” for tax purposes means that any profits are saved by the organization for future use. In addition, the paid employees of the organization cannot have any sort of profit sharing, and cannot serve on the Board of Directors.
One of the largest nonprofit organizations in the USA is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which once owned the Hughes Aircraft Company, and thus had its “charitable” tax-exempt status challenged by the Internal Revenue Service.
Six different men appeared in movies as members of the Three Stooges: The Howard Brothers (Moe, Shemp, and Curly), Larry Fine, Curly Joe DeRita, and Joe Besser.